With Valentine's day just behind us and a lot of talk of love, I thought I'd take a look on the exact opposite of love and affection- how do we write and display hatred in characters? How do characters hate, and what's the difference from rage?

In ...

How to Pick, Research and Implement Mental Disorder in a Character

So last time I talked in general about some basic concepts and principles about what constitutes mental illness, or, more accurately, mental disorder. The important thing to remember and keep from all of that is this set of truths ...

Writing a character with mental illness can be a very tricky thing. Writers usually go for the extremely rare, exotic and spectacular: multiple personality disorders, extreme manifestations of psychopathy or sociopathy, high functioning autism with that ever alluring ‘savant’ magic going for the character, bombastically spectacular schizophrenia… in many ways ...

I'm not sure how many creators do it, but I often place my original characters in different settings, writing out stories about them very much like I'd write fanfiction about some established franchise.

It's even more fun when I do it mixing them up with characters from ...

Last weekend we discussed that strange phenomenon of independent creation, where there's more than a passing resemblance to another work but it's not a case of plagiarism. Interestingly, not long after I posted that I saw not one but two instances of independent creation being brought up (though ...

I have favourite characters. There, I said it.

Although I would love to think that I love them equally, and on some level there is truth to that, there are a few I continually come back to and just want to get into them more. Now, just because they are ...

It is a typical day at the coffee shop and two baristas have to deal with the daily antics at their new job. After spending the morning trying to invent the next best spiced drink, a series of events occur from having to deal with strange customers, customers who are ...

The second week of award winners have been announced. Niccea would also like to remind everyone that she will be accepting awards extras through the end of the month. Extras are usually acceptance/ concession speeches or other behind the scenes fun.

Send extras to Niccea here:
http://www.theduckwebcomics.com ...

Mark is the mechanic for a rocket-ship searching for a habitable planet. His crew is in luck because after a hard lesson on gravity they have reached a new planet where they do not need to wear helmets. There are a few uncertain things lurking on this planet that Mark ...

Trauma is such a delicious thing in writing- it gives characters their backstories, their motivation, their special slant in a narrative wrok, from novels to webcomics.

However, it's usually considered in the context of how it has made a character ‘damaged goods’. Why they are grim, why they're ...